Originally Posted by
dckozak
Flights schools: ... quality (Meaning more $$$) big schools.
To the OP, I recommend not confusing this to mean that high cost directly correlates to high quality of education.
As others have pointed out, ATP is high cost, big, and has a spotty reputation. The folks defending ATP as a top quality school are almost always prior students defending their alma mater. Other schools like Embry-Riddle get non-alumni defending it as quality education... but overpriced. Don't be afraid to move to your training location, you'll need to do it often in the career anyway.
While my experience is anecdotal, I know of a couple flight schools that now have a policy of refusing to hire ATP graduates as instructors because their depth of knowledge was severely lacking. They've gotten burned multiple times in the past hiring them. ATP guarantees you a flight instructor position, but I believe they will send you anywhere in the country and you might not be getting as many flight hours as you'd like (maybe this policy is different now), so some ATP graduates still apply elsewhere to instruct with an uphill battle to convince some FBOs to hire them.